Share This Story!

OnLive resurfaces with two new games services

Remember the video game streaming service OnLive? After laying low following a major transition during which its assets were sold to a venture capital firm, OnLive is returning to the spotlight with new

After laying low following a major transition during which its assets were sold to a venture capital firm, OnLive is returning to the spotlight with new leadership and two new streaming services.

On Wednesday, the company announced it will appoint Mark Jung as its new executive chairman. Jung co-founded and ran the popular video game site IGN before taking over as chief of video streaming service Vudu.

"Mark is truly the ideal leader as we prepare to deliver entirely new kinds of cloud services to gamers and business," says Gary Lauder, OnLive's lead investor, in a statement.

The company is also launching CloudLift, a service that allows users to take video games already available locally through PCs and add cloud features to enjoy those titles on other devices such as laptops or tablets.

OnLive will sell digital download codes for users who want to buy directly from the service, or players can take eligible PC titles they already own and pair them with OnLive. The company has partnered with Valve Software's PC marketplace Steam, so players can tie their accounts together and add CloudLift to any compatible Steam game.

"One of the challenges the company had in the past was that it was an either/or proposition to the gamer," said Jung in an interview. "(It) forced the gamer to decide do I want to buy the game and play that copy on my local PC or do i want to ... buy it from the cloud and be limited to the cloud? CloudLift is the best of both worlds."

CloudLift will be available as a subscription costing $14.99 a month. It will launch with 20 games, with more added in the coming months.

The company is also unveiling OnLive Go, an enterprise service that will add cloud functionality to virtual worlds and massively mutliplayer online games (MMOs). The company will partner with online game Second Life, which will extend its reach to lower-end laptops and tablets.

This is the first official unveiling for OnLive since its highly-publicized transition, which included the company filing an "Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors," an alternative to bankruptcy. Their assets were eventually sold to a group led by Lauder as an investor.

"It was more of a proof of concept than a true business," says Lauder, who dismissed claims that high server costs hurt the company, but a "financial mishap." Lauder also says OnLive is in much better shape with the arrival of these new services.

"(OnLive) didn't fail because of fundamental problems with its business, but the business now is a much more viable business now that it had been then," he says.